Excerpts from the book I am currently reading, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why it's so hard to think straight about animals by Hal Herzog:
The words used for meat help us avoid thinking about the ethical implications of our diet. It is easier to order a pound of beef from the butcher than a pound of cow. Sematic moral distancing is apparently less necessary as we descend the phylogenetic scale; we don't bother with linguistic cover-ups for chicken, duck or fish.
In describing the Canadian seal hunt, the government that oversees the hunt uses neutral words: "harvest", "cull", "management plan". The language of seal hunt opponents is peppered with hot words: "slaughter", "massacre", "atrocity". What the wildlife managers call the swimming reflex of dead animals, the activists refers to as "being skinned alive."
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